John Rawls

John Bordley Rawls (21 February 1921-24 November 2002) was an American liberal philosopher. He was best known for his 1971 work A Theory of Justice, in which he stated his belief that justice is fairness.

Biography
John Bordley Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 21 February 1921, and he lost several of his young brothers to diseases. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University, and he considered becoming an Episcopalian priest. During World War II, Rawls served in the US Army in the Pacific, losing his Christian faith while experiencing the horrors of trench warfare in the Philippines. After the bombing of Hiroshima, he became disenchanted with the military, and he was demoted to Private for refusing to discipline a fellow soldier. He left the military in January 1946, and he taught at Princeton from 1950 to 1952 and later at Cornell, MIT, and Harvard. In 1971, he published his first work, A Theory of Justice, which focused on distributive justice and attempting to reconcile the competing claims of the values of freedom and equality. In this work, he coined the famous "difference principle": Justice is fairness, in the sense that the fairness of the original position of choice guarantees the fairness of the principles chosen in that position. His theory of "justice as fairness" recommended equal basic rights, equality of opportunity, and promoting the interests of the least advantaged members of society. He died in Lexington, Massachusetts in 2002 at the age of 81.